This codebreaker is using AI to decipher the heart’s secret rhythms

Roland Decollete has grown up Decollete grew up in a nursing home in Belgium, where he learned to spot the subtle early signs of intellectual decline in small changes in the way the residents walked or spoke. When Decollete was 11, his father, the nursing home’s owner and manager, began waking up in the middle of the night with chest pains and a sense of impending doom.

He was examined by two doctors, who listened to his heart briefly with a stethoscope and diagnosed him with anxiety. But the symptoms persisted, and it was only when he underwent a series of scans at a private hospital that a third doctor discovered the cause: a tiny hole between the left and right ventricles of his heart. Had he not been diagnosed, he would have died. He was 39 years old at the time.

Disaster averted, Decollete was able to concentrate on his studies, and at 17 became an undergraduate at Cambridge, the youngest Belgian to attend the prestigious university (though this created some logistical problems: a tutor had to become his legal guardian, and a new payment system had to be introduced at the university bar to prevent him buying alcohol like his classmates).

He spent the next seven years specialising in ancient code-breaking, with a cushy career in academia (or a more exciting one as an Indiana Jones-style relic hunter) tempting him. But Decollete always wondered what had happened to his father, and whether a doctor, any doctor, could have diagnosed him sooner if they had spent more than 30 seconds listening to his father’s heart. So in 2019, with no medical training but armed with the confidence that only an Oxbridge education can give, the then 27-year-old Decollete founded a company and set his sights on deciphering another ancient code: the heart’s secret rhythm.

AI is booming in medicine, only held back by a lack of data, while time-pressed doctors can only glean information sporadically: Wearables like smartwatches may be able to measure pulse, but they’re not great for more specific diagnoses (partly because the wrist is the furthest away from truly vital organs).

Decollete wanted to develop technology that could monitor the body continuously and precisely, so that people like his father could get the treatment they needed more quickly. First, he tried to embed sensors in clothing that could track vital signs without a trip to the doctor. Then he designed an elaborate exoskeleton packed with sensors that could measure all kinds of ailments. This caught the interest of the military, but it wouldn’t have been of much use to someone like Decollete’s father. “I was very naive,” he told me when we met recently in the wooden basement of a fashionable cafe in London’s Mayfair. “I worked full-time for about two years, doing nothing, from a spare room in my house.” But the problem he always faced was noise. Unless he could make a device that pressed each sensor directly against the skin, there was too much random interference from people moving around him to get an accurate picture of what was actually going on in his body.